“I heard John say that he just wants to be locked in a room with no windows and no door, where could just stay for the rest of his life, where no-one disturbs him.”
John is one of a select group of individuals taking part in the first UK clinical trials for psilocybin, a powerful hallucinogen found in certain mushrooms. After a lengthy process, special dispensation from the home office permitted a small team of researchers to test the drug’s effects, providing a glimpse into a potentially game-changing field of treatment.
Psychedelics are a schedule 1 drug, meaning they are considered to have ‘no therapeutic value’. As a class A substance, they are illegal to possess, distribute or cultivate, with a potential seven-year prison sentence and unlimited fine attached.
Such powerful substances deserve to be treated with caution and respect - but due to a history of stigmatisation and fear, scientific research has been prevented and neglected across the globe. The late 50’s and 60’s hosted some of America’s first clinical trials in psychedelia, showing promise in combating a range of diseases and conditions, including alcoholism and anxiety. President Nixon is credited with shutting down this research through the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 - an act described as being politically, rather than scientifically motivated.
Monty Wates, director of Magic Medicine, a feature-length documentary about the new clinical trial headed by Imperial College London’s Psychedelic Research Group, explained the history and frustration surrounding the drug:
“... That [Nixon’s bans] was nearly 60 years ago, you can imagine how much research would have been done between then and now into this drug and LSD and all sorts of mind altering drugs.
“It might be that we’d be down the line and realised that actually it’s not as great as it first showed promise, or it might be [that it] showed enormous promise and continued to show even greater promise. And, as people refined it and got better, it became one of the key solutions to the mental health crisis we are all facing at the moment.
“That feels to me, as someone who doesn’t suffer from depression, very sad, and I imagine it would be incredibly annoying for people who are suffering from untreatable depression right now; thinking where they could've been and what they could've been doing in society if they had been given the opportunity of this drugs’ development for the last 60 years.”
The mental health charity Mind reported that 1 in 4 people will experience a mental health problem each year, with 7.8 for every hundred experiencing mixed anxiety and depression. It can be extremely difficult to treat, with a host of causes and symptoms, varying by individual. There are existing treatments available for some types of depression, although the medication can cause insomnia, nausea and anxiety amongst other side-effects, which is far from ideal or suitable as a long-term solution.
“Simon”, who preferred to remain anonymous, is a 26 year old who has been diagnosed with depression his entire adult life. He echoed Monty’s views, saying it lead him to feel that “whoever made that decision [to not pursue the research] is more concerned with their own morality or position of influence than with the scientific method.”
When asked how it affected him personally, he said: “It makes me feel undervalued as a human being, which compounds the mental health problems that I face.”
What is the political situation surrounding psychedelics?
Wates spoke to Baroness Meacher, a life peer and drug reform advocate, about some of the barriers the research has faced in recent times, due to both the research scheduling of the drug and the political atmosphere:
“In the film Baroness Meacher hints at the press and the conservative nature within a small sea of the British public - and I think that probably has got a lot to do with it. I [also] don’t think politicians are necessarily very brave, I think a lot of them worry more about keeping their seat than doing what’s right or toeing the party line. And, if the party line is ‘stick loads of people in jail and build more jails’, then that’s what they do - even though that goes completely contrary to all the evidence about how to rehabilitate people who have got into crime. “
The topic of scheduling feeds into how we deal with drug abuse and how we punish drug offences. According to a 2017 study by the independent think tank Civitas, one in ten convictions in England and Wales were drug-related, with 88% of those sentenced being repeat offenders. While a large proportion of custodial sentences are related to dealing, the police are left battling abuse that often results from poor mental well-being, with the connection between substance usage and mental illness becoming increasingly evident.
The previous approach to the war on drugs has been widely condemned, with Labour MP Thangam Debbonaire claiming drug laws were “killing people and wrecking lives”. Green Party MP Caroline Lucas said: "There is growing agreement across the scientific and political communities, in the police and the legal professions, that we need to move away from prohibition of use towards an evidence-based, public health approach to drug addiction.”
Rather than focusing on rehabilitation as Wates suggested, an attempt to bring down dealers and cut off supply resulted in increasingly difficult and dangerous situations for addicts and police alike. The UK Governments’ 2017 Drug Strategy outlined how this needed to change, with a greater emphasis on helping addicts rather than punishing them, but there is still a great deal to do in updating current practices.
What level of legality should be advocated for when it comes to psychedelics?
Wates explained: “Definitely for research and definitely not for casual use. My experience of these things having filmed the trial is that there is no doubt that people who have fragile mental health can go to some very dark places on this sort of thing. And if they are not supported by people around them who are professional or understanding, that’s when accidents happen.”
“But certainly for research, from what we’ve seen, it is absolutely, completely inexcusable not to open this up to schedule 4 and just try it, you know? Make the parameters of that schedule 4 drug strong, so it’s not open for everyone to use however they want to use it, [but] if they go through the hoops and show themselves to be professional and want to trial or experiment with psilocybin and helping mental health problems, then we should be letting them do it. We should be encouraging them because what is out there currently is not working for a lot of people.”
It’s clear that psilocybin and other psychedelics have potential, but it is our lack of knowledge surrounding these drugs that should spur politicians and the public alike into action. Throughout scientific history it has been the shadows that have held powerful secrets; subjects that were banned or maligned that held answers to wider questions.
The question is not how much we stand to gain if we look into psychedelics - but how much we have to lose, should we chose to ignore them.